HIDALGO, Tex. — Border agents drove their patrol vehicles one
recent day at dusk through this spit of land on the bank of the Rio Grande.
Here, in a place known as the Devil’s Corner, smugglers on the Mexican side have
chosen to bring thousands of women and children to American soil.
After only a few minutes scouting the dirt roads, the agents came upon a cluster
of illegal migrants, huddled in tall grass under palm trees, seeking respite
from the baking heat. They made no effort to flee as the Border Patrol drove up.
Questioned by the agents, a boy from Honduras said his name was Alejandro and
that he was 8 years old.
“Who are you with?” asked Raul L. Ortiz, deputy chief of the Border Patrol for
the Rio Grande Valley, speaking in Spanish.
“By myself,” Alejandro said, looking up at the man in the olive uniform and
pulling a birth certificate, carefully folded, from his jeans — the only item he
carried.
“Where are your parents, Alex?” Chief Ortiz asked, using a nickname to put the
boy at ease.
“In San Antonio,” he said.
But the child had no address for his family in the Texas city 250 miles to the
north, or for an aunt in Maryland, which he thought was just as close. The
agents gave him water and the boy smiled gratefully, not knowing that his
journey, already three weeks long, would likely be a lot longer.
Families and children have become a high-profit, low-risk business for Mexican
narcotics cartel bosses who, Chief Ortiz said, have taken control of human
smuggling across the Rio Grande. They now offer family packages, migrants said,
charging up to $7,500 to bring a minor alone or a mother with children from
Central America to the American side of the river.
Smugglers like to use this snake-infested, thorn-ridden brushland for their
crossings. A federal wildlife refuge, the site is downstream from the Anzalduas
Dam, where the river slows and narrows, making it easy to paddle across. The
bank is strewn with worn-out sneakers, broken baby bottles and rotting life
preservers, the refuse of migrants who made it across and moved on. In less than
two hours one evening last week, Border Patrol agents encountered 37 migrants
walking the dusty roads here.
Alejandro said he had been brought by “Santiago the smuggler.” Another migrant
in the group was probably traveling with the boy, a neighbor or a cousin, Chief
Ortiz said. Once they were back at the Border Patrol station, agents would have
to figure out who that was.
More than 52,000 minors traveling without their parents have been caught
crossing the southwest border illegally since October, including 9,000 in May
alone, a record.
The migration surge also includes 39,000 adults with children detained since
October, also an unprecedented figure. Authorities anticipate they will
apprehend more than 240,000 illegal migrants, about three-quarters from Central
America, in the Rio Grande Valley during this fiscal year.
Many migrants say they are fleeing poverty and vicious gang violence at home,
and some were drawn by rumors the United States was giving entry permits for
women and children. But many, especially the youngest, are coming to reconnect
with families, hoping to join parents or close relatives who live in this
country, often without papers.
“There’s obviously a host of reasons that motivates the individuals to cross,”
Chief Ortiz said. “But trying to reunite with a family member who may already be
here is probably one of the ones that comes at the top.”
Chief Ortiz watched as agents coaxed information from the new detainees. The
migrants answered, some apprehensively, others seemed relieved, none attempted
to resist.
A 14-year-old boy from Honduras said, “My parents are dead.” There was an aunt
in New Orleans he wanted to find.
A 19-year-old Guatemalan woman was tugging her 2-year-old child, whose father
she said was in Indiana. Having lost her way at high noon, she was reeling from
dehydration. She gulped water the agents offered.
Increasing numbers of women and children caught crossing illegally have been
able to stay in the United States. Border authorities are required to turn over
unaccompanied minors within 72 hours to the Department of Health and Human
Services, which oversees detention shelters and works to find parents or
guardians in this country. After President Obama declared a humanitarian crisis
this month, new shelters for minors were opened at three military bases.
Officials had been releasing most women apprehended with children, but White
House officials announced last week they would begin detaining or monitoring
more of those families in an effort to discourage others from coming.
Most days, the crossings here come at dawn and at dusk. The smugglers pull up in
vans on the Mexican bank, and send loads of migrants across the river on
inflatable rafts, sometimes three or four trips in an hour. Guides know there is
little chance the Border Patrol will stop them at the international boundary
midstream.
“A lot of the times it’s in our best interests and the best interests of the
people on the raft to not attempt to necessarily grab them from the raft,” said
Enrique Romero, a Border Patrol agent, as he stood by the river eyeing the
smuggler scouts who eyed him from the far bank. “You put their lives at risk.”
While men are told to run, women and children are instructed by smugglers to
look for the Border Patrol and turn themselves in. They are told, falsely, that
is the way to get a permit.
The agents were initially cautious with the migrants, checking for gang members
or drug couriers. But soon Chief Ortiz was fist-bumping with the children. A
boy, 4, pulled on his ears to clown for the agents.
This week Secretary Jeh C. Johnson of Homeland Security sent an open letter
warning Central American parents who are considering sending their children. “In
the hands of smugglers, many children are traumatized and psychologically abused
by their journey or worse, beaten, starved, sexually assaulted or sold into the
sex trade,” he wrote. “There are no ‘permits’ or free passes at the end.”
At the border, agents trained to stop drug traffickers and adult crossers are
adjusting to the new migrants.
“We’re law enforcement officers, but a lot of us are parents or we have young
siblings,” Chief Ortiz said. “We try to make sure they recognize that, you know
what, it’s going to be O.K. You’ve got some safety and security here.”
Immigrant Children
Need Safety, Shelter and Lawyers
JUNE 16, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The surge of desperate young migrants across the southwest
border has the Obama administration scrambling to respond. It was clearly
ill-prepared for a problem that grew steadily for years before exploding this
year, with more than 47,000 unaccompanied children caught at the border since
October.
It is past time for excuses, and too soon for the post-mortem. The
administration needs to mount a sustained surge of its own, of humanitarian
care, shelter and legal assistance for children who have faced horrific traumas
in fleeing violence in their home countries, mainly Honduras, Guatemala and El
Salvador. As Vice President Joseph Biden Jr. meets this week with officials in
those countries, they should all commit to making it safe for would-be migrants
to stay home, by reducing the murders and gang crimes that feed the exodus.
Congress should meanwhile approve the administration’s $1.4 billion request to
handle the emergency on this side of the border, though more will surely be
needed to assure health, safety and due process for these young migrants.
The administration’s job has been made harder by an atmosphere of histrionics
and wild accusation, as Republican officials, far more interested in blame than
solutions, have spent weeks braying about a besieged border and laying the
crisis entirely at President Obama’s feet. More justified, and vexing, are the
complaints from those witnessing the chaos close-up.
State officials in Arizona were furious that immigration officials, apparently
without better ideas, had dumped hundreds of migrants at a bus station in
Phoenix, with no resources, to find their way. Civil-liberties groups have
reported that children have told of being beaten, harassed, threatened and
sexually abused in detention. Some children, interviewed by groups including the
American Civil Liberties Union and National Immigrant Justice Center, said they
had no food or medical care and had been held in icebox-cold cells — nicknamed
hieleras, Spanish for freezers. The administration, which has been racing to set
up emergency shelters on military bases in California, Texas and Oklahoma and a
converted warehouse in Arizona, needs to investigate and immediately correct
conditions that threaten any child’s safety and health.
Meanwhile, the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency responsible
for taking custody of the unaccompanied Central American children, badly needs
to increase its ability to shelter thousands properly as they wait to reunite
with their parents and be seen in immigration courts.
The good news is that the Homeland Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, and the head
of the Border Patrol, Gil Kerlikowske, who took office promising more openness
and accountability, have ordered an inquiry into the reported abuse. The
administration has also started a program to provide about 100 lawyers and
paralegals for unaccompanied minors.
That is a welcome response, but it needs to be bigger. The Dickensian absurdity
often seen in immigration courts — little children propped up before judges and
government lawyers with no idea of what is going on — must not be tolerated.
Concerns about the cost of providing lawyers should by eased by a recent study
from the New York City Bar Association showing that free legal representation
for indigent migrants pays for itself, mainly by reducing the costs of
unnecessary detention.
Despite what Republicans are saying, there are reasonable responses to the
crisis at the border. None requires ignoring the law or granting mass amnesty to
migrants who may have no legal claim to entering the United States. (Though many
surely do, as refugees.) Nor is it necessary to pile on more harsh and panicked
border enforcement, or abandon the administration’s promise to enforce
deportations more humanely, with a priority on criminals, not minor offenders.
The administration needs to keep its eye on the larger goal: a more rational,
lawful immigration system. Nothing about the current crisis changes that.
It’s infuriating to see the long-term reform that would ease the problem — by
opening more routes to legal immigration, and restoring mobility to a population
trapped on this side of the border — being sent to its doom by the short-term
political scheming of Congress’s hard-core anti-immigrant, anti-Obama caucus.
Noemi Álvarez Quillay took the first steps of the 6,500-mile
journey to New York City from the southern highlands of Ecuador on Tuesday, Feb.
4, after darkness fell.
A bashful, studious girl, Noemi walked 10 minutes across dirt roads that cut
through corn and potato fields, reaching the highway to Quito. She carried a
small suitcase. Her grandfather Cipriano Quillay flagged down a bus and watched
her board. She was 12.
From that moment, and through the remaining five weeks of her life, Noemi was in
the company of strangers, including coyotes — human smugglers, hired by her
parents in the Bronx to bring her to them. Her parents had come to the United
States illegally and settled in New York when Noemi was a toddler.
Noemi was part of a human flood tide that has swelled since 2011: The United
States resettlement agency expects to care for nine times as many unaccompanied
migrant children in 2014 as it did three years ago.
For these children wandering thousands of miles, it is a grueling journey,
filled with dangers. The vast majority come from Central America. Noemi’s trip
was about twice as long. She had already tried once, leaving home last May, but
was detained long before she even made it halfway.
“I went with a coyote and spent two months in Nicaragua and came back from
there,” she wrote in a school information sheet.
She got a little closer this year. In March, a month after she left home, the
police picked up Noemi and a coyote in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The authorities
took her to a children’s shelter. She was described as crying inconsolably after
being questioned by a prosecutor. A few days later, she was found hanged from a
shower curtain rod in a bathroom at the shelter. Her death, ruled a suicide by
Mexican authorities, remains under investigation by a human rights commission
there.
The number of unaccompanied minors caught entering the United States and then
referred for placement is expected to reach 60,000 in the 12 months ending Sept.
30, said Lisa Raffonelli, a spokeswoman for the Office of Refugee Resettlement,
an increase from 6,560 in 2011. In Mexico, the number has more than doubled.
No single factor explains these surges, but in Noemi’s hometown there are clues
about the forces at work in her story.
In the district of El Tambo in Cañar province, her maternal grandparents, Mr.
Quillay, 57, and María Jesús Guamán, 59, live in an adobe home with no running
water. About 15 years ago, during an economic crisis in Ecuador, their adult
children began migrating to the United States without visas.
“My four children went to find decent lives,” Mr. Quillay said. “So I took over
five grandchildren from when they were little.”
They ate from the grandparents’ farm. “We don’t have the little sweets that they
sometimes ask for,” Mr. Quillay said.
“She was just born when her father left, and when she was 3, my daughter decided
to go herself,” Ms. Guamán said of Noemi. “I raised my granddaughter the same as
the others.”
As the children grew, their parents sent money to pay for the construction of a
two-story concrete house nearby where the five grandchildren, cousins, lived on
their own.
Leonela Yupa, a cousin and playmate of Noemi, remembered playing “cocinita” with
her — fashioning from their imagination a little kitchen where they fixed
pretend meals. Noemi often joined in one of the world’s universal games: hide
and seek.
The children moved through a landscape that is a hybrid of
peasant houses, like the home of their grandparents, and larger, modern ones
that are “a symbol of the success of the Ecuadorean immigrant,” said Rafael
Ortiz, mayor of El Tambo.
The Quillays’ unparented household was common. “We have 1,040 students, and at
least 60 percent are children of migrant parents who have been under the care of
grandparents, uncles or older siblings,” said Magdalena Choglio Zambrano, a
guidance counselor at the regional high school.
The parents abroad “at times send a little shirt, shoes, $100, but it is not the
same as being papa or mama,” Noemi’s grandfather said.
A generation of children who grew up on their own in El Tambo have started to
leave, getting a hand from their parents abroad, but still requiring shadowy
journeys.
“Now we are seeing that the migrants are small children or teenagers whose
parents are sending for them, running the risk of putting them in the hands of
the coyotes to whom they pay 15, 20, 25 thousand dollars,” said Ms. Choglio, the
guidance counselor.
The cost of the trip depends on whether the smuggler uses airline flights to cut
down on overland travel, Mayor Ortiz said.
“We don’t know anything, not how they go or where they go,” Ms. Guamán said. The
parents “made the arrangements directly from there, and they called to tell us
when we had to send the girl.”
Both grandparents say they and Noemi were reluctant for her to leave. Ms. Guamán
said she argued with her daughter, the girl’s mother.
“I said to her, ‘Why take her away? She’s studying here, she’s doing well,’ ”
Ms. Guamán said. “But my daughter says education in Ecuador is no good and it’s
better for her to study there. And she took my Noemi away, only for this to
happen.
Little is known about Noemi’s travels until about 4,000 miles
later, more than a month after she left home.
On Friday, March 7, in Ciudad Juárez, police saw Domingo Fermas Uves, 52,
urinating outside a pickup truck, according to Alejandro Maldonado, a police
spokesman. Inside was Noemi. In the official account, Mr. Fermas told officers
that he was part of a network of smugglers hired by the girl’s family to take
her to the United States. The man gave false details about the girl, saying she
was 8 years old and from an inland state in Mexico. The police recorded her name
as Noemi Álvarez Astorga.
Noemi was taken to Casa de la Esperanza, a shelter for Mexican minors whose name
means “House of Hope.” Over that weekend, she was questioned by a prosecutor.
After that, a doctor described Noemi as being “terrified,” according to a report
in El Diario of Juarez.
On March 11, when called to eat, Noemi instead went into the bathroom. Another
girl could not get in. The doctor, Alicia Soria Espino, and others broke open
the door and found Noemi hanging by the cloth shower curtain.
The next day, her parents in the Bronx received a phone call from a woman who
told them that Noemi had safely crossed the border. Later that day, they
received a second call saying that she had died, according to Ecuadorean
consular officials.
The authorities determined that the girl initially thought to be an 8-year-old
Mexican was probably the 12-year-old Ecuadorean. In part because her parents,
who do not have legal immigration status, decided not to go to Mexico, DNA tests
were required to confirm her identity, said Jorge W. Lopez, the Ecuadorean
consul general in New York.
The man said to have been the smuggler, Mr. Fermas, was
arrested but was later freed by a judge, who did not find enough evidence to
hold him for prosecution, said Ángel Torres of the federal prosecutor’s office
in Ciudad Juárez. “Mr. Fermas is still under investigation for immigrant
trafficking,” Mr. Torres said. In published interviews, Mr. Fermas has said that
the story about the pickup truck was untrue and that the police had entered his
house and taken the girl under the guise of rescuing her. In the week after
Noemi’s death, 370 foreign child migrants were detained across Mexico, according
to the national immigration agency. Nearly half were traveling alone.
The minors coming from Central America and Mexico are “propelled by violence,
insecurity and abuse,” the United Nations high commissioner for refugees said in
a report issued the day after Noemi’s death. The prospect of immigration reform
in the United States is also enticing, Mr. Lopez said, because of the belief
that anyone already in the country illegally will be allowed to stay.
Noemi’s parents have said little publicly. Her mother, Martha V. Quillay, who
works in a hair salon, spoke briefly with a reporter, then curtailed the
conversation. Her father, José Segundo Álvarez Yupa, a construction worker, said
it was too difficult to discuss. “These are private matters,” he said. “This is
a very painful thing. It’s all over. We want to recover, we want to move on.”
Last week, President Rafael Correa of Ecuador, who was visiting New York, called
on the family at their home in the Bronx to offer condolences. Ms. Quillay
posted pictures from the president’s visit on her Facebook page.
Msgr. James Kelly, pastor of St. Brigid’s Roman Catholic Church in Brooklyn,
which has a large number of Ecuadorean parishioners, said recently that he heard
every day about the young people traveling alone.
“I had parents in here yesterday whose child was coming north,” Father Kelly
said. “They wanted a Mass said, that the journey would be safe.”
Maggy Ayala Samaniego in El Tambo Canton, Ecuador,
Annie Correal in New York and Paulina Villegas
in Mexico City contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print
on April 20, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
